I came through the turn at the bottom of the rise on a good, generous wheel. I dropped back by half a bike length then jumped, passing my lead-out 25 yards from the first town sign on the hilltop. Mark, the summer intern, accelerating faster, came up on my left. I lost sight of him as my vision tunneled, but somehow, he told me later, I held him off for all three signs. I'd notched, finally, the trifecta—the three sprints marking the end of one of our regular lunch-ride routes.

That was three years ago. Not long after my day of glory, things began to slide backward. My routine of weekday group rides and solo weekend outings was no longer making me faster. Each year, the doughnut hole I found myself in come March was deeper than the one before, and by June I was secure in my place in the back of the pack. The conversation was better there, but I missed turning breathless circles at the tops of hills waiting for the rest of the group. The bunch had stepped it up, and I couldn't escape the fact that I hadn't kept pace. I'd plateaued.

This is a place most cyclists come to at some time. Plateaus happen when your body has done as much as it can with what you've given it, says Rick Crawford, a nationally known coach with Colorado Premier Training. Limiters, as Crawford calls them, are different for every person, and they start to appear within just a few seasons of committed cycling. "You're given a certain set of tools at birth, DNA-encoded," he says. "As you begin to train, you have three to four years when your improvement curve is really dramatic. Then you hit your talent limit. You've fulfilled the easy part of your career—the part when gains come easy." Getting 10- to 20-percent better each year had seemed like the norm to me, as Crawford says it does for most new cyclists. Once that period ends, you can still make substantial gains—but you need to change the way you've been riding. (Say, riding every day instead of a few days a week—join our 21-Day #RideStreak Challenge for daily motivation to get out and crush your training rides.)

"There is a basic law of adaptation, and that is the law of diminishing returns," says David Swain, PhD, a professor of exercise physiology at Old Dominion University, in Virginia. "The closer you get to some inherent genetic maximum ability, the more and more work it takes to make smaller and smaller increments of improvement." As discouraging as that sounds, all plateaus are not created equal. Unless you've followed an ideal training program, with flawless coaching, unflagging motivation and the kind of time that comes only with a professional contract or unemployment, you haven't pushed all your genetic chips into the pot. Here's how to get off your own personal plateau.

First, Rest
To maintain the foundation that you've crafted to support your riding—your base, your pace work, your group rides—you need to recover properly. A cracked foundation, worn down by too much riding and inadequate rest, can halt your progression as a cyclist. "At the end of the season, you need to fill those cracks in," says Cliff Scherb, one of the founders of online coaching service TriStarAthlete.com. "And the best way to do that," he says with a grin, "is with chocolate and peanut butter. You need that mental switch off, otherwise you'll never be able to come back stronger." And he does mean off: Put the bike away, he says. Don't fret about getting fat. Accept that you're going to lose fitness and that when you come back you'll be as much as 70 percent off your peak. When I do come back, he tells me, "You'll appreciate going from out-of-shape guy to newly minted fast guy."

But rest isn't just for the off-season, and fatigue doesn't fly north like Canada geese when the weather turns warm. Swain suggests asking yourself throughout the year, "Are you getting enough rest and recovery?" If the answer is no, "that could cause a plateau." Unless you're paid to ride, you're probably trying to slot riding in amidst work and family, some weeks more successfully than others. If your life is stressful off the bike, even an easy training week can wreck you for the next one. Forget about checking your morning heart rate or cortisol levels, says Swain: If you're feeling fatigued and unmotivated, you're overtrained. He suggests taking a whole week off "or at least backing off this week. Get some more sleep, and then come back at it a little better next time."

Build a Base
Once your rest and recovery are complete, you can begin constructing the foundation for a breakout season. "Building base," says Crawford, "is one of the best ways to break a plateau." Base fitness training enhances your body's physical infrastructure—muscle fibers, capillaries and cellular energy factories. The time to build it is in winter or early spring, when your cycling hours are at a yearly low and a structured program may be just what you need to get yourself outdoors. Crawford recommends eight weeks of low-intensity, high-volume riding. Skip the hammering: Mixing in higher-intensity rides, Crawford says, "calls off the production of residual fitness in favor of short-term adaptations." In my case, that means eschewing the big group ride and pedaling solo or with a couple of like-minded friends.

During a base ride, Crawford suggests keeping your heart rate at 70 percent of your maximum (see "Max Factor," left), varying your cadence and incorporating sprints of three to five seconds to keep your fast-twitch muscle fibers awake. Break up your base program into two four-week blocks. In the first block, you'll increase your training volume for three weeks and use week four to recover. For the second block, your intensity will crawl up a bit each week until your recovery in week eight. You can adjust the plan to fit your schedule, but remember that the hours you squeeze in here will pay off come summer.

Tap Your Potential
You can use the residual fitness gained through Crawford's base program to shore up other weak areas of your cycling foundation. For example, even if you've been a cyclist for years, you can increase the pace you can sustain and the length of time you can sustain it. "Humans are incredibly capable of increasing endurance," Swain says. In fact, most of the rides that recreational cyclists log do exactly that.

Every year, as the weather turned warmer, I'd ramp up the hours I spent in the saddle so that I could hold a steady, comfortable pace all day on solo rides and take long pulls on the group ride. "But within a couple of months or so," Swain says, "you will have reached the level that you're going to have for that year." Don't expect to rock a five-hour ride at group-ride pace just because you're fit—a mistake I made at least once a year. To ride harder over a longer distance, you need to work on your VO2 max, which is the amount of oxygen your body can take in and process.

No matter what you do, you cannot increase your VO2 max beyond a genetically predetermined limit. To see where yours stands now and how it responds to structured training, you'd have to invest in a series of tests. That's a great way to spend money if you're an aspiring pro, but I'd much rather put that cash into my new-bike fund. If you've been training for a few years and see diminishing returns in your capacity to ride harder and longer, it is a safe bet that you're starting to bump up against the limits of your VO2 max.

The good news is that although you can't substantially raise your VO2 max, you can increase the percentage of your potential that you use. And you probably have a lot of room for improvement. Elite athletes may be able to maintain an hourlong effort in excess of 90 percent of their already-high VO2 max, but the rest of us, Swain says, "could do that for five to 10 minutes." In order to increase the percentage of your VO2 max that you can draw on, Crawford recommends a progressive-pace plan. If you can sustain an average pace of 20 mph, for example, increase your pace to 21 mph for 30 minutes during your next ride. Once you can do that comfortably, add five minutes at a time until you are proficient at the faster pace. Then start all over again, one mile per hour faster. Crawford suggests finding a "fun and challenging environment" in which to tackle this workout for two days straight, followed by a recovery day. A full week would look like this.

It's not a quick fix, but this kind of pace work can wring almost every drop out of your genetic potential. "Getting to 90 percent of VO2 max for an hour? It's a hard thing to accomplish," Swain cautions. But with some dedicated training, he says, "most people could do it."

Work Over Your Workout
My plateau was as much mental as it was physical: I was getting bored, and it showed. This one-time winter rider found venturing out for cold-weather rides growing ever more challenging. My lost fitness rendered the group ride both impractical and embarrassing, and the prospect of yet another right turn out of the driveway, followed by the first left, then the third right... well, it just wasn't enough to overcome the sound of my neighbor's flag snapping in the wind.

If you've been riding the same way for a while, you may simply need a fresh approach. "When plateaus happen, a change is necessary," says Crawford. "Getting athletes motivated to push through cruxes takes mojo that can be summoned only if they are amped and excited about it." Scherb, who coaches and rides for Team Type 1's triathlon team, agrees that novelty is essential. "If I give you the same stimulus week after week, eventually you'll respond to that stimulus very well, but you'll never go past that."

As a triathlete, Scherb prescribes a multisport approach. He recommends his four-week Plateau Buster block of training following your base work to jump-start your season. You can also use it to mix things up midseason if you're feeling flat.

Let the Busting Begin
This past winter, I took six weeks off the bike. I took Scherb's peanut-butter-and-chocolate advice to heart, and added some cheesecake to it. I got fat. And then I started to ride again. I couldn't hang with the group, but pedaling alone or on the wheels of good friends, I reminded myself why I love this sport. Once, going 3 miles per hour, I tipped over on an absurdly steep gravel-road climb. I dusted myself off and walked my bike to the top, laughing. I fell asleep when I got home 30 agonizing miles later. When I awoke I noticed that my thighs had stopped quivering and my self-doubt had fled. While I had quite a climb ahead of me, I was looking forward to it. This time, there would be no endless plateau halfway up the hill.